Worlds at Stake by Aaron Saad

Author:Aaron Saad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Degrowth

Pathological Consumption and the Detritus of Fad and Fashion

The unrelenting nightmare of not being able to print our faces on the foamy head of a freshly poured pint of Guinness has at last come to its end thanks to “beverage-top media” technologies. There is finally, too, a mini home refrigerator that will come to you wherever you are in your house so that the fraught and harrowing journey to the kitchen can now be avoided. In that fridge, you might store the wine you can now buy for your pets (so you might drink together in front of the custom bobblehead of your cat or dog that you can also now have made) or the plastic shells shaped like eggs meant for you to pour eggs into after you have cracked their original shells (no more peeling hard-boiled eggs!).

Launched by Guardian columnist George Monbiot (2015), the hashtag #ExtremeCivilization will occasionally mark items like these on Twitter. It gives the platform’s users a way to highlight stunningly outlandish instances of the heights of excess our consumerist culture has now achieved. And while it might be tempting to laugh off things as obviously decadent as 3D batter printers or smartphones for dogs, so very many of us have been participants in consumerist excesses, right from a young age. Consumerism has so many ways of enlisting us to buy things we do not (or should not) particularly need. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that the most powerful applications of knowledge generated in the field of human psychology have been in marketing, leveraging all sorts of powerful, deep-seated cognitive and emotional human functions to promote the pathology of consumption. If consumer impulses are not stimulated through fads, nostalgia, or planned obsolescence, there is always the tried-and-true methods of marketing, which turn to anything from preying on our insecurities to selling us lifestyles and values through sophisticated branding.

The frameworks covered so far in this book all agree on one thing: more and perpetual economic growth is good and even necessary. While they might, particularly in these times of inequality, disagree over how the gains from that growth are distributed — whether they accrue to the wealthiest at the top or are shared by the population more generally — those frameworks all converge on a consensus about the desirability of more growth. Indeed, there is nothing in the predominant thought or practice of conservatism, libertarianism, neoliberalism, or even social democracy that suggests the economy can reach a point of sufficiency beyond which it need not continue to expand. In each, the model for a decent society is some version of a high-consumption capitalist Western nation, one in which quality of life is ever rising thanks to growing income.

But this “growthist” consensus fails to properly acknowledge something enormous. Our economic system’s need to maintain perpetual economic growth is a powerful driver of environmental degradation — including climate change. This is, after all, the other side of the coin of consumerist excess. Just think of

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